Jesly > Jesly's Quotes

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Some folks are forced to the edges by their difference. (...) But 'tis at the edges that they find their power.”
― Hannah Kent, The Good People

“Some folks are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with skin a little a thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.”
― Hannah Kent, The Good People

“I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt. The poems composed as I washed and scythed and cooked until my hands were raw. The sagas I know by heart. I am sinking all I have left and going underwater. If I speak, it will be in bubbles of air. They will not be able to keep my words for themselves. They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“You will find the way, daughter of the forest. Through grief and pain, through many trials, through betrayal and loss, your feet will walk a straight path.”
― Juliet Marillier, Daughter of the Forest

“The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.”
― Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows

“She had often wished for adventure, for old spells and wicked kings.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“See what you want, Aelin, and seize it. Don't ask for it; don't wish for it. Take it.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Circe, he says, it will be all right.

It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. ... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what is means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Have you no more memories?"
I am made of memories.
"Speak, then.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Beware the autumn people”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Sing, Muse," he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death. And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“He always thinks because I’m reading, I’m not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

“Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji

“death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.”
― Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.”
― Rudolf Steiner